May 28 Apple Acquires Beats Electronics For $3 Billion

Today Apple announced that it has acquired Beats Music and Electronics for $3 billion. Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine are set to join Apple and they will be reporting to Eddy Cue.

Here is a snippet from Tim Cook's interview with Re/code during their first annual Code Conference:

"Peter Kafka: This is such an unusual deal for Apple. Why did you make it?

Tim Cook: This is all about music, and we’ve always viewed that music was key to society and culture. Music’s always been at the heart of Apple. It’s deep in our DNA. We’ve sold Macs to musicians since the beginning of Macs. And we accelerated the music industry with the digital music revolution with the iPod and the iTunes music store.

So we’ve always loved music, and believed in the power of it, and believed that it could transcend language, culture and bring people together and produce emotions and deep feelings that other things can’t. And we’ve stood at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. So I see this right in the – if you were drawing a line, this would be the logical next data point.

What Beats brings to Apple are guys with very rare skills. People like this aren’t born every day. They’re very rare. They really get music deeply. So we get infusion in Apple of some great talent.

We get a subscription music service that we believe is the first subscription service that really got it right. They had the insight early on to know how important human curation is. That technology by itself wasn’t enough — that it was the marriage of the two that would really be great, and produce a feeling in people that we want to produce."

The deal is set to close in the fourth quarter and is subject to regulatory approval.